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Drake

@rumoredreferent / rumoredreferent.tumblr.com

he/him • local language lad bravely answering the question "what if there was a guy who was a dude but also like in a bi way"
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In a world of dirty food courts, I'm one of the rare FEW who returns my tray to the slot above the trash and cleans up all my trash. SHARE THIS POST if you're attracted to women

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

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if i had to be dumped by any type of guy it would be an ‘ENDING EXPLAINED’ type youtuber. the closure would be insane

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im sobbing in a chair while he explains the top ten most fucked up easter eggs from our relationship you might have missed

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With robots taking over the jobs , I think we need to invent new cool professions. there needs to be a forest man position, where you wander the woods with a walking stick and guide travelers. I think there needs to be a steampunk themed blimp guy, and I also think cool pirate gangs should be legal. I also think weed should be illegal again so teens have something to fight for. 

ROUND 1: GILGAMESH (the epic of gilgamesh) VS SCRATCH (ice age)

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@headspace-hotel time to do propaganda

Is Scrat canonically bisexual and part of a world-shaking gay love saga so enduring it's the oldest known work of written literature? No. Is Scrat known as "He Who Saw the Abyss?" No. Did Scrat build the great walls of Uruk? No. Does Scrat wield a sword that weighs 120 pounds? No. Did Scrat commit so many atrocities it required the gods to build a gay soulmate for him to keep him occupied? No. I rest my case.